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To get a sense of the pain many black Americans feel about their
broken connection to Africa, just listen to the cries of joy when
the divide was bridged by blacks who used DNA to trace their roots
to a specific country:

"My life has been turned upside down," said Veronica Henry of
Las Vegas, who quit her corporate job in information technology and
set up website www.myafricandiaspora.com after she learned in 2007
that her mother's lineage came from the Mende people of Sierra
Leone.

Said Stephanie Smith of Randallstown, Maryland, after tracing
her roots back to Sierra Leone: "I finally feel some of the
separation between myself as an African American and other Africans
beginning to fall away."

Others said they were almost physically sick with anticipation
as they opened the envelope containing their DNA test results that
could reveal their ancestry.

Since DNA mapping made it possible to trace ancestry, tens of
thousands of people around the world have taken tests. But the
process is of particular interest to black Americans because it
offers to reverse the terrible forced separation from their
home.

To many Africans, Barack Obama's trip to Ghana starting Friday
will represent a homecoming for the first African American
president and he will be welcomed as a son of the world's poorest
continent who has attained global power.

Obama's heritage includes Kenya and his father came to the
United States as a foreign student, but the trip will also generate
interest in the success of other blacks in retracing their
roots.

One effect of the slave trade that flourished between the 1600s
and the 1900s transporting around 10 million Africans to the
Western hemisphere, including 4 million to the land that became the
United States, was that black Americans almost never knew which
part of Africa they came from.

Formal reconnection

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"I always felt like a fake or an intruder if I tried to join or
participate in heritage festivals or cultural conferences that
focused on a particular place in Africa, say Ghana, Senegal, or
Kenya for instance," said Smith about her experience prior to
tracing her roots.

"Now I feel like I belong," she said.

Veronica Henry is trying to formalize the reconnection by
applying for Sierra Leone citizenship to go along with her US
citizenship.

Tracing involves taking a swab of DNA and analyzing the
resulting mitochondrial DNA for maternal lineage or the
Y-chromosome, which only men carry, for paternal ancestry, said
geneticist Rick Kittles of the US company African Ancestry, which
focuses on tracing roots for black Americans.

The company says it has successfully conducted 15,000 tests
since its launch in 2003, but because matrilineal genes spread to
all female members of a family it calculates 100,000 Americans now
know their African roots.

Scholars are also interested in the DNA data to help them
clarify where slaves were from.

Results show matches in 27 African countries, though they are
most common to the Hausa and Fulani peoples of northern Nigeria and
the Tikar and Bamileke groups from Cameroon, said company founder
Gina Paige.

Going back

Obama's trip will include a tour of the fort at Elmina on
Ghana's Atlantic coast. The castle contains an infamous "Door of No
Return" - a small door facing out to sea - through which thousands
of Africans passed in chains before being rowed out to slave ships
that would take them to the New World.

But if Obama's visit generates historical interest and
represents a moment of pride for his supporters, it also begs a
question: how far can real connections be restored by African
Americans seeking their roots?

"I hate to say this but in many ways black Americans are
resented in Africa," said Andrew Young, a former US ambassador to
the United Nations whose company, GoodWorks International, has for
decades done business in Africa.

"A lot of times they (African Americans) bring this on
themselves because they go back to Africa like they belong and in
their minds they do belong, but not in the minds of the
governments," said Young, a black American who was prominent in the
civil rights movement during the 1960s.

On the surface, Kalimah Johnson, a social worker from Detroit,
fits perfectly the image of a naive black American happy to be at
home in Africa. Johnson traced her roots back to the Akan group in
southern Ghana last year.

"Ghana is absolutely wonderful. I feel like I fit right in. I
love the people," said Johnson, interviewed by telephone last week
during her first trip to Africa, during which she visited the
capital Accra and Elmina as well as Senegal.

But Johnson said she was tempering her enthusiasm about her
affinity with people there and by way of caution, recounted how
somebody attempted to swindle her at the airport when she first
arrived in Accra.

"I have never had this romanticized idea that the people in
Africa would say 'Welcome home'," she said. But "people have
treated us like royalty."